Stop using Microshit products China. Anything critical, really anything, but especially anything government or military related should be run on hardened systems. Anything public-facing like email servers that unlike say a Windows 10 desktop cannot be really locked down or secured via other systems should be something other than Microsoft. I really hope China still extensively keeps secrets exclusively on paper as that’s the only way to stay safe at the level of exposure they have to western tech from the empire of hackers that is the west.

This is why Chinese software and hardware is a threat to western national security. If they can’t learn of and make use of vulnerabilities before they’re patched how can this evil empire of hackers and criminals continue to dominate?

I mean this isn’t the right way to frame things. The right way is this is a distraction from the actual problem which is child sexual grooming on roblox being an epidemic. This or making a child kill themselves “for satan”, either way the pretext is just a sensational distraction from the actual problem.

The child grooming potential from roblox despite their moderation and heavy censorship systems is due to capitalism. It is due to capitalism because it is a monetized game. The monetization provides an incentive to lure children to predators who are willing to pay for game-bucks for them and encourages the children to meet them, to talk to them, to stick around and be groomed by them, to do sexual things for money for them, and to enable the children to be potentially blackmailed by those acts if that wasn’t enough into further acts.

Roblox itself is the disease with its disgusting monetization system which creates this world where any child predator with a few hundred or thousand dollars to blow can get children who just want some shiny game things their minds have been groomed by corporations to crave even at the expense of their safety to cooperate with, even seek out predators.

Frankly, ban children from playing games with monetization systems like that and lootboxes. Or ban the games from using them if they target or are found to have a large population of under 18 players they can’t get rid of. Roblox is a pedophile corporation. One of many. It grooms children, it exploits children, it opens them up to further predation and profits off it.

Saying the Iranians put themself in this position is ridiculous though.

I mean they didn’t put themselves in this position alone but they teased the monster by enriching uranium beyond their needs.

They don’t need 60% enrichment, not at the quantities they were making. Not for medical research or other bullshit I’m pretty sure. It was done as a middle finger to the west to kind of taunt them to get them back to the table and to get something like the JCPOA back. It was a negotiating tactic and an attempt to punish the west by saying “see, you break your deal, we’ll enrich far beyond our needs, now that we’re here at this mark you need to give us more concessions compared to when we were at that lower mark”. It was a bunch of “bad stuff” they could in theory trade to a west that doesn’t exist, the west that maybe existed in the minds of Iranian liberals in exchange for things they wanted.

That was a tease, it was insincere and a negotiating tactic most likely and a taunt against the zionists and the US who have been hounding them about getting nukes. It was silly to go half-way thinking they could negotiate with the west and it was a bluff clearly as they didn’t go the rest of the way.

And we can see from other Iranian actions they do other gestures like firing their oldest and most easily intercepted rockets at the Americans, warning them ahead of time as a “response” to US aggression and bombing them that they intone highly of “retribution” and god and blah blah blah but when the time comes they duck the war or striking back. They avoid doing anything that would seriously escalate the situation and alter the status quo they’ve had in tit for tats with the zionists for decades. They chose the off-ramp.

Fact is Iran blinked. It was probably the right move under the circumstances for their own situation (maybe not the world, probably not Palestine but who knows). They threatened the US not to get involved, the US punched them in the face and they did this purely propagandistic gesture of spitting at their feet and stomping off while declaring victory (while the US does the same).

So yes, in conclusion they put themselves in this position to be doubted as anything but a paper tiger with their moves as mentioned AND by not getting that nuke.

I have no doubt if the US starts a full on invasion of Iran they’ll respond but the US knows this and is content to manage it and knows what lines it can step up to and how to salami-slice. The zionists got Iran to stop firing missiles at them after all. Palestinians got nothing. Iran got a propaganda victory that’s transparent and empty.

To be fair the Iranians put themselves in this position by enriching uranium beyond their needs and teasing getting a nuclear weapon without ever getting one or intending to get one likely entirely as part of positioning themselves better for bargaining after losing JCPOA. So it wouldn’t be a first and this is why you shouldn’t act that way.

This is 100% for their planned war of aggression.

It’s not just kayfabe, it’s not just money for land mine manufacturers. It’s to provide a defense against a Russian counter-thrust after they drive NATO forces deep into Russia via a hole in this. That way they figure they can shape things via controlling where troops end up. Russia should 100% lay their own mine-fields in response because it’s impossible to know exactly where NATO forces are going to dismantle their own minefields in future to thrust through some armored columns. They should wait until after NATO does it of course so they look worse but make the mines now, get out the plans for razor wire deployments and signage to attempt to block off the mine-fields from wandering people.

Westoids are completely deranged about losing hegemony to China and multipolarity and are preparing a suicide-rush on Russia. That or they want to dissuade Russia from helping China when they commit 80% of their forces along with the US to attacking and containing China (and possibly attacking Russian shipping in the process thus giving them valid reason to respond).

Sadly the US is an old master at front companies and re-routing logistics. They bought all that titanium from the USSR for their SR-71 and other advanced warplane projects through an elaborate network of front companies. So it will mildly increase costs but not stop the US from getting what it wants if any significant amount at all is made available to western companies.

Critical support to him in exposing the empire’s lies. At a time like this I think his role in providing an anti-empire view is far more important than his problems.

Yes, he is problematic to put it mildly as he has patronized prostitutes in Germany and bragged about it. Being proud of r*pe is not a good look but I’d certainly rather he be popular and young people flock to him and his views than any other mainstream view on offer in the US. He is unambiguously a net good at present despite his problematic attitude towards sexual exploitation of women, his ambiguous views towards China, the fact he’s not an ML, etc.

So now is not the time I think to attack him as he’s on the right side of these issues at least usually.

The problem is the zionists also have access to the production capacity of Europe and the US. As well as other vassals like occupied Korea. Combined these are substantial amounts of production.

The war against Iran will be economic, by sea, and by air not by land. So having working anti-air, being able to intercept enemy stealth bombers (including US) before they can deliver big payloads to take out industry or nuclear sites is important.

The big worry is the zionist entity resorting to using nuclear bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear sites, likely with US approval and help and with Europe rushing to justify it as being absolutely necessary and/or cast doubt on the bombs being nuclear and call it Iranian propaganda. At that point Iran’s nuclear program is moot and in the past and the west and the zionists can afford to settle with Iran in exchange for some sanctions relief and an end to direct hostilities. I expect if that approval goes through, the US and the zionists will burn another cyber-weapon and/or electronic warfare to bring down Iran’s air defense long enough to deliver the nuclear weapons.

This will buy the zionists breathing room to complete the genocide and cement hegemony over the middle east/west Asia so sadly I think its very likely they do it especially once this conventional war escalates to stopping shipping and taking out oil refineries and infrastructure (we’re basically there already) they have little to lose at that point. As it is Hezbollah is out of the picture for the time being, Yemen and Iran are the only ones standing aside from the resistance in Palestine which is well only able to do so much and really on the back-foot at this point.

Russia cannot help Iran given its own war with Ukraine and its need to apply its entire arsenal there. Another reason why the west might be okay with the zionists using nuclear bunker busters is their own resources are stretched thin by Ukraine and short of abandoning it and just dropping it right this moment to shift all production to supporting the zionists they can’t do both so may see this as their option to continue Ukraine while also allowing their zionist proxy to win its battles.

I really hope they don’t dare do that but they seem so deranged and probably feel so close to victory and yet also collapse at the same time that they may be pushed to do it.

If the US and Europe get dragged into an extended war here or have to empty their reserves to support the zionists it’ll push back conflict with China by years more. Then again the plan could be all along to do everything to cement hegemony in as many places as possible before confronting China in order to ensure they have few friends, no trade routes, and limited partners.

The mainland can obviously send far more missiles back and destroy their strike capacity. Russia does this in Ukraine all the time.

These are not rational actors. Neither is Ukraine. Both are and would be in this scenario run by liberal fanatics/fascist fanatics willing to burn their nation to a cinder for the US. Ukraine is illustrative of this point not really mattering per se.

Meanwhile, if the island is under blockade then the US trying to fly things in will be an act of war.

And targeting Russia’s nuclear triad and hitting their bombers with obvious help from NATO intelligence isn’t? The point is the west thinks rules don’t apply to them and given Russia hasn’t hit MI:6 with an oreshnik yet they seem to be right. In that they can do whatever they want and if you hit them back directly as long as they have a cover THEY themselves believe in no matter how flimsy for their actions they will fly off the handle into a genocidal self-righteous indignant rage. Russia seems to know this, China probably does as well.

I’m not saying the US wouldn’t do that, but at that point it’s a direct war with China for them.

Only if China chooses to and given Russia keeps blinking they may think China will as well and that they can unilaterally escalate while their foes will avoid it, giving them the advantage.

Also, the whole US strategy is predicated on China doing a ground invasion. Every naval battle the US simulated against China, they lost horribly.

Is it? I saw a story of the head of JSOC talking of naval drones and basically mining the whole straits, turning into a zone China cannot cross and using that time to do whatever they want including landing forces. I don’t think the US plans to send in their carrier battlegroups and fight on China’s front door. They are not that stupid and even if they were good strategy would call for assuming they’re smarter than that as one should never underestimate one’s enemy. They have island chains and have been building naval drones in secret for some time now so they can do over the horizon type fighting. Their point like with Ukraine is to bleed China, not to triumphantly plant the US flag but to bleed them, to hurt them, to study them and learn their secrets, to demoralize them, to force it to take longer and be costlier and to make it a big spectacle they can use to rally the western world against China around as this big travesty and atrocity.

I maintain given the US advantage, given island chains not just around China but those policing west Asia, Africa, etc and NATO’s combined naval sizes plus all the land bases and air assets they have that most likely they want to bleed China in the SCS, use it to justify decoupling, sanctions and an embargo and blockade and carry out that blockade off the coast of Africa, Diego Garcia, in the various straits using the zionist entity in west Asia, etc, etc. To draw China out, to spread them out, to hit them with combined naval and air assets and use the superior logistics and amounts of bases NATO has. By doing this they cross out the major advantage China has in the SCS with land-based missiles and rocketry and fight from the high-ground.

Just look at how the trade war is destroying the US economy right now. Imagine what happens if China explicitly cuts off exports to the US.

Which is why they’re so desperate to decouple. The bribes didn’t work and were pocketed, Trump is very clumsily trying tariffs. But when it comes down to it they might think they can force decoupling with a conflict when all else has failed. Sure the consumer economy would implode but I’m not sure capitalists and empire planners wouldn’t consider that and forcing the proles to a much lower quality of life as they work to re-shore an acceptable if painful cost of survival and maintaining hegemony.

A coup is not that unlikely either, some retired military people in Taiwan have openly talked about it already.

I really hope that happens but I wouldn’t count on it. I’m sure the island is filled with US spies and trained dogs and any coup would face a counter-coup of ferocious proportions with support from US assets in Japan and possibly those US special forces already on the ground.

I just worry most about the nukes flying. I hope this conflict doesn’t start until China has a chance to massively expand their arsenal and proof it against Aegis and ground and orbital interceptors.

I suppose the issue is the puppet regime there would likely respond to a blockade with military force. Not day one, maybe not even week one but eventually.

They have thousands of rockets trained on the mainland which they’d fire and rain down on the military and civilians alike in China to push the issue. Yes they’d eventually run out but the problem is the US would try to fly more in. Ships you can ram and get in the way of and blockades are therefore effective without needing to blow up a carrier, planes you have to shoot down and at that point it becomes a question of whether China would shoot down a US military transport plane and put itself in drawing first blood type of thing at which point you get American chuds hooting and baying for blood in response and liberals declaring we also must respond to “stand with Taiwan”.

Make no mistake the US does not intend to let the Taiwan card be only half played. They won’t let China quietly strangle it into submission with a blockade or sanctions, they will force the government to attack China and start a war no matter how doomed a position it puts them in because it lets them paint China as militarily aggressive and rally Europe and the anglo-sphere and their loyal Asian vassals to decouple from and sanction China in response with a purported cause they can blast to their populations.

Let’s also not forget the US has reserve currency status. They can spend as much as they like. Let’s recall the Berlin airlift where the Soviets cut off truck and land shipments into divided Berlin post-war and the US just responded by using its immense wealth and military and industrial and logistics might to just fly supplies in.

Frankly short of a coup by rational military generals in Taiwan who order the stand-down to save their lives and those of their countrymen I just don’t see a situation where the US doesn’t use Taiwan in a Ukraine style play. They won’t last as long but they really only need to hold out for a week of breathless western propaganda coverage and crying about evil China to get things done. After that it doesn’t really matter if they crumple and China doesn’t need to do a massive invasion because they’ll have drawn the blood they wanted and cast China as the villain and victimized Taiwan to do it.

NATO war-mongering monsters are gearing up for a war of aggression again.

Whether it’s actually with Russia or just a faint and the plans are to use it all against China is the debate to be had I suppose. They’re totally deranged and totally in the thrall of the US, any sense of independence that people felt they were edging towards has been rightly relegated to the trash-bin as they remain committed to white, western supremacy at the expense of all else.

Now is the time for European comrades to agitate against the austerity being imposed to support funding all of this. Anything that even slows this program delays what may be a nuclear war.

It’s interesting in itself that they choose to announce it. It’s a soft declaration of war of sorts really and perhaps another step along the line to preparing their populations for open war with China (and perhaps Russia too at this point). They claim they’re “hitting back” despite clearly hitting first but perhaps that’s part of the plan too.

Good to point out that they’ve also publicly announced recruitment of spies from Russia and China with slickly produced, very publicly disseminated videos on social media trying to recruit people from both nations as well as open statements by US intelligence leadership that they’re stepping up recruitment and targeting and claiming they’re not meeting goals (never trust a liar). So they’re very much making this an official cold war at the very least if not paving the way for stepping up to a hot war in future from these open acts of aggression.

Part of it may be messaging, they want the public, they want Hollywood “thriller” writers and such to notice these things and make more anti-China, anti-Russia content and for there to be this undercurrent of a sense of we’re at war with China and Russia.

Once again evidence that Ukraine is being used by the west as a global tool for maintaining its hegemony. Even after the current regime falls I expect the west to move their heavily trained CIA specialists (swastika tattoos and all) to Africa or Asia to continue CIA backed operations aimed at enemy states and disrupting multi-polarity. It’s a real problem because right now they’re contained within Ukraine. Russian forces are unable to kill them in large numbers as they’re used as blocking units and the first to fall back from the front while reluctant conscripts are the ones dying as canon fodder so it’s very likely even in a fall of Berlin type scenario that the west organizes their evacuation and these types are never killed by Russia but moved to be assets elsewhere. As it was with the most heavily trained and raving fascists in other comprador states last century like south Vietnam, so it is today. Only this time thanks to the poor tracking of weapons deliveries to Ukraine they’ve managed to smuggle and set aside quite a dangerous high tech weapons cache for future use.

Exactly. Russia had only bad choices. They tried to navigate them as best they could. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to see that the west was playing them all along with the Minsk agreements and such but even if they’d had known that making the move was incredibly dangerous and the more time spent preparing the better.

Russia’s hand was quite literally forced. Either stand up now at the last moment or be trod on for the next decade or more. Either way NATO would have won and that’s what people saying Putin made this worse don’t understand: the chessboard was already fixed. What Russia has pulled off instead we must be aware of is nothing short of a humiliation of NATO and the west so dire that they’ve nearly escalated to all out war against Russia and only Russian nukes prevent that. They have without intending to given hope to the global south, to anti-imperialist forces, to everyone who resists US/EU/NATO hegemony and that is worth more than a few more racist, reactionary Euro-nazi-lover nations officially joining NATO instead of maintaining a tactical neutrality.

Putin’s fault for not allowing a Nazi regime on Russia’s borders which would have been built up military for several more years then used to attack Russia after getting it into NATO and used as a potential springboard for an under 5 minutes nuclear decapitating strike on Moscow or something else equally deranged?

Putin was between a rock and a hard place, the objectively correct thing would have been to invade and subdue Ukraine in 2014 after the coup, to roll in and murder all the Nazis and dismantle their military but Russia foolishly got played into diplomacy stalling. Besides that objectively if Russia had done that in that year the sanctions against Russia at that time would have done far more damage, possibly would have destroyed Russia because at that time they hadn’t had years of time to take steps to prepare and insulate themselves from the shock and pain.

It’s NATO’s fault. It’s the Euro loser vassals’ fault, it is the fault of the US. Russia really didn’t have any good moves to make and every year it waited meant more Russians who would die in the fight against an increasingly more well armed and more well trained by the month military.

I think it would be a mistake to view China as isolated in this.

In -ALL- of this? No. In this specific situation where everyone else has already slipped the tariffs? Yes. Absolutely they’re standing on their own basically in the immediate moment.

As to US soft power I think Trump was already the sign that they’ve given up on that. If they hadn’t they wouldn’t be gutting all the soft power operations with DOGE and doing so much damage to image with threats to annex Greenland and Canada. I think the die has been cast there that hard imperialism is the way forward, cold war 1.0 playbook basically. I think Ukraine was a wake-up call because US propaganda didn’t pull in the global south, it just plain failed outside of Europe and US vassals in Asia. What soft power they retain will be aimed at “traditional values” crowd as in the cold war, running up red-scare stuff about Chinese commies gay marrying you against your will and things like that.

America is very much in a do or die situation and we know it, they know it, China knows it. They’re trying to undergo a transformation which will either succeed in prolonging their grip on power or hastening their demise, the way to delay and hedge against either was to continue the old path but that led to certain doom while this they feel gives them a chance.

This is just phase 2.

IF Trump was rattled by China’s retaliation he would include them in the pause and pretend it had nothing to do with them, he’d attempt to play it off as a global thing so as to not given undue impression of power on China’s part. That he hasn’t tells you he doesn’t care.

The point of this was never hurting say India. It was always about China, other nations were included to disguise this fact and to shake them down because why not. Also to pressure them to bring them into the fold for the next phase.

But the fact that China’s tariffs were increased, not removed tells you all you need to know. Namely they are absolutely dead serious about decoupling from China.

India is not going to help China, they’re a reactionary/fascist nation actively trying to stab China in the back and take their industry and courting the US for a trade deal which the US will give them in exchange for helping move important (iphone, etc) manufacturing from China to India for the US. China is courting them anyways in public but it won’t work. The only real allies China has in this are likely to be Vietnam (maybe, US is trying to peel them from China and stoke division and these moves were going to badly hurt Vietnam but were pulled back), DPRK, Russia. The US likes those odds. The US feels it can deal with an isolated bloc of those countries and Trump feels he can maybe peel Russia away with time.

China made a call and Trump seized on them trying to stand fast and rally the world to them to fight the US by giving everyone else a reprieve and thus no reason to stand with China while he leaves them isolated and alone. They can’t back down now so in a way I think Trump has them where he wants them. Namely standing alone, with the rest of the world negotiating with the US on terms which will doubtless include measures to pull them into the US orbit and away from China’s orbit in exchange for tariff relief.

I don’t disagree with China’s call but they may have walked right into a trap of certain intent and design by the US. To be fair they didn’t have any great choices. If they just bowed their heads and pleaded on their knees things would also be bad for them. I’ve heard that Trump admin has been refusing meetings with envoys and so Trump and co are lying about China not trying to negotiate, it’s just a lie they’re pushing while they refuse to listen or treat with China so they can justify all of this and cast China as the belligerent aggressor who doesn’t want to be fair.

It’s about isolating China. It’s about creating economic interests and incentives that isolate China and I think its working at least at this stage. The pause will cause most countries to come and negotiate and most will be given relief for token concessions which Trump will trumpet as big deals and big wins.

The US may indeed be intent on devaluing their currency to make exports competitive but as part of this they have to isolate China, they have to smash Chinese industry and competitiveness and look what we have? China standing alone against the US, calling out to other nations who even now slink away from it leaving it alone because no one else wants this fight, they all want to take the out because the US is still too strong.

China needs to use what strength it has to really hit the US.

Though I worry it doesn’t matter. I worry they’ve built into their plans a hope that tariffs can continue to spiral out of control, that Chinese goods become unaffordable, that the economy crashes, that supply chains are forcibly rerouted and there are years of shortages but that they achieve a quick, fast, if painful decoupling from China leaving them free to isolate, sanction, blockade, and attempt to destroy China using their navy, their control of global finances to sanction and make trade with China for third party nations impossibly expensive or painful, and so on and use this to crush Chinese industry and economy, to break up the belt and road, to re-enslave the global south that China was trying to free with better loan and development terms. If that’s the case and capital doesn’t revolt and I think there’s a very good chance it doesn’t as at least tech capital seems to be standing with Trump and can always be bought off with specific exemptions for say Apple to import x amount per year not subject to tariffs then China has a hell of a fight ahead of them.

And no rerouting goods through India for finishing for lower tariffs isn’t a long-term solution as at that point the capitalists begin to ask why they’re paying those higher Chinese wages and then a cut for the Indian finishers when they could just move production itself to India as Apple has been doing to a degree.

The way for China to defeat the US and specifically Trump’s anti-Nixon shock was to rally other countries to it and create their own system based on common interests of resisting US tariffs and they seemed to be making moves to attempt this, but now no other major country on earth (save maybe Russia which is subject to sanctions instead of tariffs) has that common interest, the US quickly peeled them away by offering everyone else a way out but keeping China in the cross-hairs after China had already escalated leaving China alone locked in a loop of escalation with the US with other countries looking on but having no interest in challenging the US while it’s still this strong.

Let me join the circle of shame. Having people to latch onto leaving Evangelical Christianity was important to me when I was younger and he was one of those I unfortunately latched onto. Funnily enough all I ever did with him, Hitchens, etc was read their books. Never did the whole parasocial thing of clinging to their every statement and youtube video like so many people do which seems contrary to the nature of atheism as a thing without prophets to follow.

A lot to say without much actual proof. Those things COULD be used to persecute the LGBTQ+ community but that doesn’t mean they are. As could many things, a country could selectively enforce all kinds of much more neutral sounding laws exclusively on gay people as a means of persecution.

I’m sorry but without any proof I’m not ready to go throwing them out and cede to liberals and reactionary anti-communist rainbow-washing forces that they are actually indeed so. There’s so much misinformation about the DPRK it’s not even funny.

If being gay is considered a decadent act by the government

That one IF is doing a huge amount of lifting, your argument falls apart when you take it out.

which it likely is,

Proof, we need proof, not “I feel like it is”. And yes all countries have persons in them, including those attached to the party who hold backwards views on a variety of things.

In particular I’ll note Eastern notions of frowning on something are not the same as western active persecution. There are also issues of things lost in translation. China doesn’t criminalize being gay but they very much crack down on LGBTQ-CIA organizations (we need a Buttigieg rat emoji) that advance a western, liberal slant.

I make no claims they are some bastion of rights for queer people as they’re likely not given their history and material circumstances but I think this whole post is making a mountain out of a molehill of evidence. You can’t just leap from one conclusion to another more severe one.

At the end of the day cfgaussian’s take is mine but I think OP jumped the shark with a sweeping and unsupported by evidence alarmist proclamation.